1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to lacrosse gloves and, more particularly, to a protective sports glove and padding for the same that provides improved flexibility, increased protection, and finer tactile feel.
2. Description of the Background
Protective sports gloves are commonly used and, indeed, are required to be used in many organized sports such as lacrosse, hockey, and other contact sports. Such gloves protect the wearer from impact of lacrosse sticks, hockey sticks, balls, pucks, skates, and other players.
Protective sports gloves include padding to protect the player's fingers, hands, wrists and lower forearms. Despite their protective function, such gloves must balance other design factors such as weight, feel and flexibility. For example, the handling of a lacrosse stick requires a player to hold and control a lacrosse stick handle in specific ways, with many different combinations of hand placement over the length of the handle. A lacrosse player constantly moves his hands along the handle in multiple positions.
In executing game skills, lacrosse players must be able to grip and control the lacrosse stick handle, e.g., “stick handling.” Effective stick handling requires a player to constantly reposition his hands along the handle to control the head of the lacrosse stick. For effective stick handling, a lacrosse player needs to maintain utmost flexibility of the hand, a sure grip, and a precise tactile feel for the stick. However, the hand also needs protection and so players typically wear padded gloves to protect their hands and wrists. These gloves usually include foam padding or other protective padding covering the back of a wearer's hand, fingers, and thumb.
Some conventional sports gloves have pad segments (e.g., made of foam) that are covered with leather or synthetic leather and, in the breaks between the segments, are affixed to one another and to a liner material (also known as the scrim), such as a woven fabric. In these conventional gloves individual foam pads are typically sandwiched between two fabric layers and the layers are sewn together, and to the liner, between breaks in adjacent pads. However, this conventional construct is fairly rigid in design and compromises flexibility and tactile feel for protection. When such a protective athletic glove undergoes deformation due to normal use by a wearer, adjacent pads come into contact with each other and this arrests/resists further motion. In addition, the inflexibility of the fabric layers and liner resist stretching and further arrests/resists motion. In straining against these forces to maintain a grip on the lacrosse stick, a player tends to lose their tactile feel for the stick, and consequently their stick handling capability.
Even with gaps or breaks between the protective pads to allow for flexibility, there is a limitation to how far adjacent pads can move relative to each other and still maintain adequate protection of a player. What is needed is a protective sports glove and padding for the same that provides improved flexibility, increased protection, and finer tactile feel.